


dig me up, lay me down

by radialarch



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, canon-plausible necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:08:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21945316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: “Griddle, I amnotfucking a skeleton for a weird sex game with you!”
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 36
Kudos: 255
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	dig me up, lay me down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackedofSpades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackedofSpades/gifts).



> JackedofSpades, I was very inspired by your enthusiasm for BONE STRAP-ON, so. Happy Yuletide!

_Come on, you must have done it_ once, Gideon says.

As it turns out, one of the worst things about having Gideon Nav living in the back of one’s head is that Gideon becomes much harder to ignore.

 _Harrow._ Haaaaarrow _. Nonagesimus, queen of the night, oh revered Reverend Daughter, my—_

It’s giving in, when Harrow snaps, “I have not.” Transparent. Absurd. And yet— “Such an act could only be conceived in your depraved little mind.”

 _Yeah_ , Gideon admits, shameless. _So it’s lucky how my depraved little mind is in you now_. A long, expectant pause. _Really? Nothing?_

Harrowhark Nonagesimus is the ninth Saint to serve the King Undying. Her power is beyond comprehension; a regiment of the Cohort’s best necromancers could not achieve in a year what she can do with a single breath. As a lyctor, she is the fingers and the hand of God himself.

Gideon Nav says, _But you loooove bones._

“Not,” says Harrow, as coolly as she can, “carnally.”

 _Oh, Harrow_ , Gideon says, with affection so deep Harrow almost can’t bear it. _Then why did you keep me?_

Harrow read her first skeletal diagram at age three, and before she was six she’d understood enough about necromantic theorems to create her first construct. It had been a forearm, the ulna and radius nestled together, and she’d been so transfixed by that gently curving space between bone that she hadn’t even noticed the blood dripping out of one ear. Other houses traded on flesh and mind and soul — complex, messy things — but Harrow was of the Ninth, and she had the sweep of a scapula, the complex interlocking cradle of ribcage and sternum. 

And after all that, a lifetime of perfecting what the Seventh House might call poetry, Harrow had still been struck dumb by the way that Gideon’s bones had lit up, wild with thanergy, the moment she decided to die.

 _That’s what I’m saying_ , Gideon says, enormously satisfied, into the silence of Harrow’s head. _You wanna do my bones. I wanna do you. Let the bones have it_.

“Griddle, I am _not_ fucking a skeleton for a weird sex game with you!”

 _No, of course not_ , says Gideon, and she must have planned this, bided her time to spring the perfect trap. _Seeing as how you’re the necromancer, you’ll be the skeleton_.

Laboratory Three, is Gideon’s proposal, and Harrow never could resist a necromantic challenge. Assembling the skeleton is easy. It would have taken no effort even back in Drearburh. The vertebrae strung out in their characteristic S-curve; the long, slim femurs. She’s raised constructs by the thousands, since that first time, and the shape of it is as familiar to Harrow as breathing.

( _I can’t believe you kept me in your_ closet, Gideon says.) 

But there’s no mistaking the bones for anything but Gideon. There’s the thickened right humerus from the two-hander, a jaunty tilt to the mandible and the way the skull sits upon the spine. Her constructs had always been perfect, a model of the ideal skeleton, and Gideon, lovely Gideon, is anything but.

“You realize this might not work,” Harrow says again. She’s picking at the sleeve of her robe; she makes herself stop, smooths the material over her bare thighs. “You had a nervous system when we tried this last. There’s just no _consciousness_ —”

 _Yeah, but they're my bones_ , says Gideon, simply. _So now they're yours_.

“An overly literal interpretation of _one flesh_ ,” Harrow mutters, but she flings her mind outward anyway.

Imprinted in the history of these bones is a time when they were alive, strung with nerves. More Palamedes’ area, but Harrow knows the theory. If she can recall those impulses, the precise pattern of electricity that made up Gideon, with enough conviction, the bones will gladly move for her.

Harrow knows Gideon, the way a lyctor knows her cavalier: instincts swallowed whole, so that Gideon’s sword is her sword, Gideon’s reflexes her reflexes. And Harrow, as it turns out, knows Gideon once over, from her days in Drearburh trying to eat Gideon alive. Gideon had learned Harrow’s tricks, and so had Harrow. The only two sparks of light in a dark and decaying House; no wonder she remembers. 

And then Harrow is Gideon.

In Laboratory Three, _Imaging_ and _Response_ , Harrow had experienced the peculiar feeling of being in two places at once. This isn’t quite the same, but here’s Harrow, sitting on the bed, robe loose around her shoulders; and here’s Harrow, with the sensation of being too tall and too broad, a creature of bone and nerve and will. She loses it immediately — gets it back, anchors her consciousness to Gideon’s skull thread by thread. The skeletal frame nearly shivers to pieces before she figures out how to stabilize the thanergetic flow, but that’s enough. There’s a sudden, profound silence, and Harrow, and Gideon.

“Do you think this counts as masturbation?” says Gideon, out of Harrow’s mouth. “Is that weird? I didn’t think about that part.”

 _What I’ve just done_ , Harrow says, breathless with triumph, _is as near as a body can come to resurrection. Your sudden moral compunction is your problem_.

“Who said anything about compunctions?” Gideon retorts. When she leans back, the robe slides off Harrow’s shoulders. “Come on, Harrow,” she says, like a dare, offering up Harrow’s own body for the taking. “Come and get it.”

Harrow had spent much of her life trying to deny Gideon her wants, but this time, she goes. Her first move is clumsy, jangly with nerves, but Gideon was never one for delicacy. Touching her is like taking a war to bed, and Harrow’s body has always been a battlefield. 

Gideon’s body remembers arousal; Gideon’s body remembers desire. Harrow drowns in it, willingly, and when Gideon makes an impatient sound, shifts Harrow’s hips up in a clear demand, Harrow has just enough faculty left to coax a smooth column of osseous tissue from the cradle of Gideon’s pelvic girdle and slide into her, wet and willing.

Harrow’s mouth is open, round with shock, but it’s Gideon’s eyes in her face, Gideon’s awe. As children Harrow had tried again and again to surprise Gideon in defeat, and she’d never once thought it might be just as satisfying to leave her reeling with victory.

“Harrow,” Gideon says, a hoarse, quiet confession, and that’s what undoes her.

Harrow’s body is aching and warm, when she comes back to it, and Gideon safe in the back of her mind. “Was that all that you wanted?” she asks. “I will recognize it as a point taken.”

 _I have some critiques_ , Gideon says. _For one, could’ve made my dick a little bigger._

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Harrow. “That sword has to be compensating for something.”

Harrow is nearly asleep when Gideon laughs. _See_ , she says. _You totally got boned_.

A great wave of affection wells up in Harrow, and she's muzzy enough that it slips, unbidden, into her voice. “Griddle,” she says. “Good _night_.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] dig me up, lay me down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22515637) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)
  * [[Podfic] dig me up, lay me down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23451712) by [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)




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